Much of the literary work born in the Romantic period was focused on images of nature and the strong emotions that these evoked; the works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley are no exception. Both written in 1819 and published in 1820, both Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind” and John Keats' “To Autumn” offer elaborate, emotionally charged images of autumn through odes centered on the use of the apostrophe. However, the similarities shared by these two poems are far outweighed by their differences; “Ode to the West Wind” and “To Autumn” differ greatly in both tone and overall message. Where Keats celebrates the arrival of autumn, framing his presentation of the season with ideas of life and prosperity, Shelley laments it, regarding autumn not as a beginning in itself, but as the bitter end of spring. In these poems, which both describe autumn or aspects of it, autumn is presented in two very different lights: in one, as a bringer of life, and in the other, as a symbol of death. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get the original essay "Hymn to the West Wind" by Shelley, addressed to a wind that is described in the poem's opening line as the "breath of Autumn's being” (line 1), is characterized from the beginning ultimately gives a tone full of darkness and negativity. The speaker begins the poem with a comparison between the fall and death, thus setting the stage for the jarring morbidity with which the poem is imbued throughout. The poem begins with a reference to the wind to which the title refers, “from whose invisible presence the dead leaves are driven away, like ghosts by a fleeing enchanter” (lines 2-3 Here the image of the fleeing ghosts conveys an immediate sense of chilling darkness,). accompanying the direct reference to the idea of ​​death with which the speaker so clearly associates the fall. The image of dead, ghostly leaves serves as a tangible symbol for the more abstract concept of fall as a whole, which the poem insists on representing through the. lens of death and sadness. Even the most seemingly positive observation the speaker makes about autumn is inherently negative, where he refers to "a deep, sweet though sad autumnal tone" (lines 60-61), a sadness that one might assume, after having Having read the verses that lead up to this point, it is profoundly sad. “Hymn to the West Wind” gets more and more morbid as it goes on. The speaker does not simply use the image of death as a method of signifying an end; it is a symbol that he expands into an increasingly dark symbol as he continues offering details about the disease. For example, he describes the "yellow, black, pale, and red multitudes / Pestilence-stricken" (lines 4-5). These references to plague and the frenetic red of tuberculosis-induced fever contribute to an image of the fall not just as a form of death, but as a contagious disease that is infecting the natural world until it is left “like a corpse in the his tomb." (line 8). It is lines like these, as well as references to autumn winds as “dirge / Of the dying year” (lines 23-24), that go beyond the abstract concept of death to offer concrete details that leave the reader with an uneasy sense of darkness and morbidity. Together, these lines evoke in the reader an image of autumn as a kind of funeral procession, mourning the "corpse" of the earth as it passes into the even greater darkness of winter. Keats's poetry, on the other hand, conveys a tone of positivity that is in stark contrast to Shelley's depiction of the fall as a kind of disease-induced death. The three stanzas of”..